Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/30

 witnessed the amazing growth of manufacturing and commercial centers in the North and East and the still more wonderful rural and urban development of the West, the South was entirely content with the spread of her cotton-fields and oblivious to the stagnation or the slow growth of her towns. Her country-gentleman class was doubtless content with this state of affairs, and her politicians actually boasted of it, being put on the defensive in all respects on account of the attacks made upon slavery; but the leading inhabitants of the towns regretted the backwardness of their section and devised various schemes for remedying it, while the merchant class openly complained of the fact that young men were taught to look down upon every pursuit other than planting. This is but to say that the people of the South were not so different at bottom from their hopeful, energetic fellow citizens of other sections as has sometimes been imagined. They were Americans tied down to one occupation and rendered unprogressive by the hampering influences of a belated institution.

This fact does not appear on the surface; indeed it becomes apparent only to the careful student of sources of which the Southern historian